Hacker News Reader

Comment by JimminyCrocket | Hacker News Reader

Youtube on Firefox for me is awful. I get constant buffering on 1080p+ content. Chrome is flawless. I have the same extensions on both browsers, curious if anyone else has experienced the same recently?

View on HN

Are you running an old version of FF? I used to have issues with YT about two years ago but they made fixes and it has been fine since then.

I watch a lot of YT content through FF and it has worked fine on both Windows and MacOS / OS X for a long time.

There was an article on HN about this recently. I'm on phone so can't search easily, but something about it using a polyfill for a chrome specific feature. There was a way to get the old behavior in the article I think.

You install the "YouTube Classic" Firefox extension to force YouTube to use its old (non-Polymer) layout. This extension won't help with video buffering issues, however.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-class...

Yes, I notice this on my mac (mac book pro, 2015?): I'll even often open Safari just to watch youtube videos. It's fine on my Linux machine (X1 Yoga thinkpad) though.

YT recently got choppier for me too, but I put it down to the layout changes rather than FF.

Try out the 264ify extension. Forces h264 instead of vp9, can block 60fps videos too.

It was discussed some time ago on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027

TLDR: YouTube uses some obsolete technologies that aren't supported in non webkit browsers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com